Last week
the Canadian media was abuzz with the story of Aqsa Parvez. Ms. Parvez was the
Mississauga, Ontario teen killed by her father for reportedly refusing to wear a
hijab, the headscarf worn by some Muslim women as a sign of their religious
faith. Commentary was swift to follow. Barbara Kay of the conservative National
Post speculated that if Canada had prohibited religious paraphernalia like
hijabs in schools as France does, Parvez’s life might have been spared. The
Globe and Mail’s Sheema Khan, a hijab-wearing Muslim herself, portrayed Parvez’s
demise as one of a series of recent incidents of violence against women,
including the victims of serial killer Robert Picton and a Windsor, Ontario
nurse murdered by her former husband. I have questions about both Kay’s and
Khan’s analyses. In the first case, even if such a law against hijabs in
Canadian schools existed, it might not have prevented Mr. Parvez from killing
his daughter for not wearing it outside the classroom. Khan on the other hand
seemed to lump three very diverse phenomena together: of note, neither Robert
Picton nor the nurse’s ex used religion as a motive for their deeds.

Nonetheless, the death of Aqsa Parvez eventually turned into a discussion about
Islam and the hijab. Is Islam inherently oppressive to women? Is the hijab a
sign of women’s subordination in that religion? Can Muslim immigrants integrate
successfully into Canadian and other Western societies? Interestingly, this is
not the first debate about religious headgear in Canada. The early 1990s saw the
controversy over the right of Sikh members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
to wear turbans on the job. While Sikhs claimed that wearing a turban at all
times was an essential part of their religious faith, opponents insisted that
all Mounties be obliged to wear the traditional Stetson hat.

I
personally didn’t have strong feelings on the issue either way. If someone were
going to protect me from crime, I thought, at the end of the day it didn’t
really matter what he or she wore on his or her head. On the other hand I wasn’t
so emotionally or philosophically invested in the concept of religious rights
that I would have automatically demanded that the RCMP permit turbans on duty.
Eventually the Canadian federal government ruled in the Sikhs’ favour, and the
controversy more or less died down.

However,
the turban as a whole does not generate the strong emotion that the hijab does
in Western society, for several reasons. First is the fact that the turban
doesn’t involve gender issues. While some Sikh women wear the turban, it is not
mandated for them as it is for Sikh men. Those Sikh women who don turbans do so
for the same reason as their male coreligionists: to show their commitment to
their faith. According to the article “Why Sikhs Wear a Turban”
(http://www.urbanmozaik.com/UM.2006.April/April.2006.html/april06_fea_5.turban.html)
Sikhs originally adopted the headgear as a rejection of India’s Hindu caste
system, wherein only the “higher-ups” (kings, nobles, etcetera) wore it. By
requiring all its members to put on a turban, Sikhism demonstrated in a visual
way that all of them were equal.

The hijab
in contrast was instituted for Muslim women to ensure their modesty, “modesty”
not in the sense of being humble and not flashing fancy hairdos but rather in
the sense of not being sexually suggestive. Of course this requirement may be
interpreted in two manners. Some women who actually wear the hijab like it
because they say it protects them from being regarded as “sex objects” by men.
On the other hand, one Western feminist states that the concept of the hijab is
inherently sexist because it posits women, or their hair, as “enticing” and
places the burden on them to avoid “tempting” men.

In
addition, most Westerners do not associate Sikhism with terrorism as they do
Islam, despite the fact that Sikh extremists exist. In 1985 Canadians’ attention
was riveted on the bombing of an Air India jet returning to Canada by Sikh
militants. White Westerners nevertheless do not think of Sikh terrorism as a
threat to them personally – indeed, the Canadian government was criticized for
not promptly investigating the Air India disaster because the victims were not
White. Sikh radicals’ target remains India, not the West, though the language
they use to describe that country resembles that of the Islamic militants in
some respects. For instance, just as the latter call the United States the
“Great Satan,” a Sikh-Canadian paper once showed a scene in which a Sikh
protestor against the Indian government carried a sign with the words “India –
Democracy or Demon-cracy?” The majority of White Canadians did not view the Air
India bombing in the same way as 9/11 or the subway attacks in London and
Madrid.

Outside the
terrorist realm, Sikhism as a religion fails to evoke the visceral reactions in
most Whites that Islam does. There is no equivalent of “Islamophobia” to
describe the fear or hatred of Sikhs, for example. This might stem from the fact
that in contrast to Muslims, Europeans’ contact with Sikhs has been much less
extensive. Sikhism originated and was practised in a small corner of Pakistan
and Northern India far from Europe, whereas Islamic territory lay immediately to
the south and east of what was once known as Christendom. Even the British Raj
did not lead to anything like the Crusades between the Sikhs and their European
overlords.

Nor did
Sikhism acquire the same political connotations in the West that Islam did.
While a few Westerners have converted to Sikhism, either on their own initiative
or through marriage to a Sikh, there has been no mass movement towards the
religion as happened when throngs of American Blacks embraced Islam in the 1960s
and ‘70s as a means of rejecting the West. Conservatives wary of if not
downright hostile to Islam tend to look at Sikhism with a more neutral eye. For
example, the above-mentioned Barbara Kay warns readers not to place the hijab in
the same category as the Christian cross or Sikh kirpan (a ceremonial dagger
carried for religious purposes).

This is why
I believe that the turban has not become the burning issue the hijab has.

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